Your Name Becomes the Biggest Anime Movie, Ever.

by Michelle "Ms. Geek" Klein-Hass

It looks like the new animation superstar, following on the on again/off again/on again/and once again maybe off again retirement of Hayao Miyazaki is Makoto Shinkai. Shinkai's phenomenal success with Kimi no na wa 君の名は, known better in English as Your Name, has been made complete. As of January 15th, 2017, it has become the highest grossing animated film from Japan world wide. It is also the fourth highest grossing Japanese film in Japan, edging out the first Harry Potter film and Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle.

All this before the film's wide release in the United States. Our friends at Funimation have finally finished the English Dub, and Your Name will be released in both Dub and Sub versions in theaters beginning on April 7th.

The English Dub took so long because not only did the dialogue have to be replaced, there were four crucial songs by Japanese band RADWIMPS that had to be rewritten and re-recorded. The songs are actually part of the story, and provide a "Greek chorus" to the action in the movie. RADWIMPS has now released a taste of the rewritten songs. Since they contain elements of the plot, if you are concerned with such things we're going to have to give a SPOILER ALERT before embedding the video from TOKYOPOP TV.

RADWIMPS lead vocalist Yojiro Noda split his time growing up between Japan and the US, so his pronunciation and English usage is pretty spot-on. In fact, unless you know that Noda also sang the Japanese versions of each song, you'd be convinced that he was an American singer brought on for the project.

And it should be mentioned that even though Your Name has taken this long to be localized, an original language/subbed version of the film premiered at Anime Expo 2016 in Downtown Los Angeles, California, US even before it premiered in Japan. It seems like Shinkai has his heart set on creating animated film for a global audience, not just as an afterthought.